Why Is Democracy Worth Defending?

More and more Americans are turning against democracy. According to a 2023 survey from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, 24% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans agree with the statement, “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government.” A series of 2024 Pew Research Center surveys says roughly two-thirds of Americans don’t think our democracy is working very well—and satisfaction with democracy itself has fallen by 10 points since 2021.

That trend is global. The Pew Research Center has found support for democracy as an ideal slipping around the world over the past seven years. Those opinions reflect a real-world trend: A new report from the V-Dem Project—which convenes over 4,000 researchers around the world to aggregate their data—finds that authoritarian governments are gaining ground. Almost two-thirds of the world’s population (5.7 billion people) now live under authoritarian leaders, a 48% increase from 10 years ago. Around the world, according to this team of political scientists, core democratic mechanisms like fair elections and a free press are troubled or declining.

Why? That’s a question hotly disputed among scholars and citizens alike. But, according to Henry E. Brady, professor and former dean of the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, the problem boils down to rapid technological change and rising economic inequality overwhelming governments. Those forces have combined with climate change to trigger mass migrations, which strains infrastructure and social cohesion. When governments don’t seem able to effectively address these kinds of problems, he says, they lose legitimacy—and that creates an opportunity for would-be dictators.

In the face of these challenges, now is a good time to ask ourselves: What’s good about democracy? Why is it worth defending?

Democracy vs. authoritarianism

The trouble, of course, is that more authoritarian governments face the same problems—but they don’t have the same level of transparency, and so their failures are not as apparent.

Brady cites the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, who famously argued that there are no famines in functioning democracies because “you can’t get away with having one.” Through channels like independent peer-reviewed research, investigative journalism, or the debates that unfold in election campaigns, “democracies do better ultimately because people are better able to recognize problems,” says Brady.

It’s important to note, however, that studying competing political systems involves a tremendous amount of uncertainty and disagreement. John Gerring is a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who has published a number of large-scale studies comparing outcomes in democratic and authoritarian systems. He cautions that this is extremely hard to do, because of the chaos and complexity involved. Moreover, “democracy is not randomly assigned,” he says. “So all the things that cause a country to become democratic or authoritarian could also affect the outcomes that we want to explain.” In other words, for example: Are more prosperous and peaceful countries more likely to become democratic—or does democracy drive peace and prosperity?

However, even acknowledging those limitations, says Gerring, the consensus among researchers is that the citizens of democracies do tend to be happier and healthier than those in more authoritarian countries.

In a 2022 paper, Gerring and his colleagues looked at results from 1,100 cross-country analyses published after the year 2000, covering 30 outcomes like human rights, military and criminal justice, and overall governance—and they found that democracies perform as well or better in almost every domain.

Of course, nothing is ever simple: “For inequality, inflation, and public spending, there is no case for democracy producing desirable outcomes,” write the authors, suggesting that democracies don’t always do a good job of managing their money.

Seven benefits of democracy

Democracy can’t protect us from every bad thing—but the research to date says that it has done a much better job so far than alternatives like dictatorships, military juntas, monarchies, or one-party systems. So, how is democracy good for you? Read on.

Greater well-being

There is a robust connection between democratic decision making and self-reported happiness—or what researchers call “subjective well-being.” One 2017 study looked at a diverse group of countries (including, for example, Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Rwanda, in addition to the usual Western suspects) and found that people living in stable democracies were much more satisfied with life than those in less democratic countries. (Of course, there are many factors interacting to shape happiness in a given country—especially economic ones—and researchers have discovered that, in fact, inequalities create happiness gaps within countries, which drags down their collective average.)

The quality of democratic institutions and the type of democracy matter, too, when it comes to happiness. Another 2017 paper used data for the nations of the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States to discover that the happiest people lived in countries with parliamentary and proportional representation electoral systems, perhaps because those best represent a range of interests and viewpoints. However, across multiple studies, the overall picture is pretty clear: On average, the more democratic a country is, the happier its people tend to be.

Better health

In a 2012 study, Gerring and his colleagues found that long-standing, stable democracies had much lower infant mortality rates than their unstable or undemocratic counterparts. Another 2018 study by Yi-ting Wang and her colleagues studied a data set that tracked 171 countries for over a century. They found that “democratic elections have consistent effects on health outcomes even when other important factors, including good governance, are taken into account.”

Both those studies found that the age of a democracy was a big influence on health. Why? Authoritarian governments aren’t as good at health care for the majority partially because powerful minorities tend to hoard medical resources and ignore the needs of the many—but transitioning to democracy does not instantaneously make people healthier. “You need time to build up a bureaucracy and distribute health care and ideally do things that extend life, like vaccinate kids,” says Gerring. “Those things don’t materialize in a jiffy.”

More human and civil rights

Democracy is majority rule—but it’s also comparatively good at protecting minorities. That may seem like a paradox, but consider the role of the rule of law and and constitutionally protected civil liberties, which are designed to restrain the power of majorities and powerful elites.

Indeed, according to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2024, the world’s democracies are substantially better at protecting religious, racial, political, and sexual minorities from bias and persecution than are autocracies, in part because those minorities can band together for self-protection. As Anthony J. McGann argues in a 2004 paper, “Majority rule offers most protection to minorities because it makes it easiest for a minority to form a coalition that can overturn an unacceptable outcome.”

Relatedly, a 2020 study by Larry M. Bartels found that people who are more hostile toward ethnic minorities tend to have more anti-democratic attitudes. As that and other studies suggest, bigotry and democracy are simply not compatible, with one undermining the other.

Stronger relationships

“Social capital” refers to the strength and diversity of our contacts with friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and more. The research to date suggests that democracy and social capital have what sociologist Pamela Paxton calls an “interdependent relationship,” with the health of one tied up in the health of the other.

In a 2002 paper that used data from the World Values Survey and the Union of International Associations, she finds that the two bolstered each other—so long as civic organizations were in some way connected to a larger community. In other words, organizations that channel people into, for example, community sports leagues or farmers markets strengthen social capital, while those that are more insular (like not-in-my-backyard activist groups) don’t.

In a more recent paper for the Review of Political Economy, two Greek researchers find strong evidence for the same kind of relationship, with democracy boosting people’s social capital and their social capital fueling their satisfaction with democracy. That’s a finding supported by many other studies that find, for example, that rural social capital leads people to give more input to government decisions through forums like debates and town meetings, which translates into more trust between the people and government.

Less war, more peace

One of the strongest conclusions from the research to date is that democracies tend to be much more peaceful than their authoritarian counterparts. “There just aren’t very many examples of two democracies fighting wars with each other,” says Gerring. There are some interesting nuances to this discussion, like the fact that when democracies do go to war, it’s almost always with autocracies, and the democracies are much more likely to win those wars.

In a 2014 paper, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his colleagues argue that “because defeat is more likely to lead to domestic replacement for democrats than for autocrats, democrats only initiate wars they expect to win”—and that same public pressure drives more resources toward the military than dictators are usually able to muster. At the same time, healthy democracies are much less likely to experience civil war, domestic terrorism, and military coups. In fact, the rise of civil wars in recent years might be linked to the decline of democracy around the world.

Stronger, more egalitarian economies

Democracies enjoy more stable and sustainable economic growth, and they’re overall more redistributive, believe it or not, meaning that functions like education and health care tend to be more public and universal than they are in authoritarian counterpart countries.

While some people might believe that cut-throat capitalism and colonialism are responsible for democratic prosperity, the global picture is much more complicated. As Brady points out, there is such a thing as what he calls well-being or egalitarian democracy, where “not only do you have autonomy as a person and people have to respect your rights, but also you have the right to pursue happiness—and that means there should be programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, social security, and so forth, so that throughout your life, no matter what befalls you, you have a safety net.”

Indeed, the world’s social democracies—of the kind found throughout Europe, with manifestations in places like Canada, Bolivia, and New Zealand—have become the world’s happiest nations by embracing a social safety net for everyone.

Better governance

If your employer steals part of your wages or forces you to work overtime, will the Labor Commission act? Are your investments protected by the courts? Do you need to bribe someone at City Hall to get a building permit? Issues like these hint at the quality of governance—an umbrella term for functioning, responsive, honest government.

In the 2022 meta-analysis mentioned above, Gerring and his colleagues found this is an area where democracies tend to excel, relatively speaking. Though countries transitioning to democracy are more vulnerable to bribery and nepotism, says Gerring, “over the longer term, the countries with the longest democratic histories have the lowest levels of corruption.” That’s a conclusion shared by many other studies—some of which suggest that maintaining solid administration is also key to sustaining support for democracy, especially when it comes to crime and law enforcement.

As we approach the 2024 election, it might be easy to feel complacent and imagine that because American democracy has endured for centuries, it will continue to do so—or we might feel that embracing a more authoritarian leader will “make America great again.”

But “democracy is more fragile than most of us like to think,” says Ray Block, senior analyst for the African American Research Collaborative and the Michael D. Rich Distinguished Chair for Countering Truth Decay at the RAND Corporation. “Not fragile like glass. Fragile like a bomb. Not caring for it means that we perish.”